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Back in the days before stringent rules governing the sale of drugs, store shelves were awash with medications bearing pretty labels extolling their ability to fix all sorts of diseases. Many were patent medicines containing lots of alcohol and/or opium, which of course on their own can temporarily numb pain and perhaps convince you that your particular illness isn't quite so bad. These medicines were often named after people involved in their creation and were generally useless aside from the b........ Read more »

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Drugs do many, many things. Some of these we want, others not so much. The latter get called side effects. One of the less-desired yet relatively benign side effects associated with many drugs is an uptick in the fart department. While perhaps humorous to some, this outcome is generally viewed as unpleasant due to the associated bloating and pain, not to mention the embarrassing sensory assault that is a barrage of toots.... Read more »

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It's time for yet another colour post! Deadly poisons and useful drugs can cause regions of your body to take on a different colour from normal. In addition to being super weird, these unexpected colours often provide a valuable clue for doctors looking to make a diagnosis. Let's look at a couple of examples...... Read more »

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I like making lists about living things. Colour is a great starting point for such lists, whether they're about body parts infected by microbes or the origins of science words. For this post, I'm going to look at how bones and teeth can take on a bunch of strange colours...... Read more »

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Twins are born near the same time, that’s one of the things that makes them twins. But do they have to be born close to one another? The record is twins born 104 days apart. The key is to get the twins past 25 weeks so the lungs will be mature enough, but if one twin is delivered, the second might be subjected to delayed interval delivery to give the lungs longer to grow.... Read more »

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In the past, pharmacology was a rather, shall we say, murky area of study. Figuring out how to treat an ailment using a drug sometimes involved a lot of educated guessing, and oftentimes the information backing up a guess wasn't particularly solid. Let's look at a couple of examples of the historically weird logic behind drug treatments...... Read more »

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Argania spinosa (argan) is a tough little tree endemic to a limited area in southwestern Morocco and a bit of very western Algeria (Tindouf). Patchy forests of the tree cover about 800,000 hectares of the semi-arid Sous valley. These represent a unique biotope and have been designated a fancy UNESCO biosphere reserve. The presence of the forests slows desertification, as the drought-resistant trees act to stabilize the soil. Argan trees can live up to 250 years and are able to make do ........ Read more »

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Ethylene is a colourless gas that was widely used as a general anesthetic in the 1920s through 1940s. It apparently works pretty well at knocking people out and is less toxic than the chloroform and ether that proceeded it on the surgical floor. However, its flammability and outright explosiveness when mixed in certain proportions with oxygen, coupled with the development of decidedly less flammable halothane and related compounds in the 50s and 60s, led to eventual obsolescence.In addition to b........ Read more »

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Whole-genome sequencing holds enormous potential to improve the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. Although this approach is the only way to capture the complete spectrum of genetic variation, its application in clinical settings has been slow compared to more targeted strategies (i.e. panel and exome sequencing). Everyone talks about cost as the main contributing factor for […]... Read more »

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This is the second post reviewing recent novel trials for the treatment of bipolar disorder.Again, for my sources I am using are clinicaltrials.gov and PubMed.Clicking on the study title will take you to the clinicaltrials.gov site for more detailed protocol information.Allopurinol Maintenance Study for Bipolar DisorderThis completed study examined the effect of 300 to 600 mg per day of allopurinol on mania prevention. Allopurinol is a drug used primarily for the treatment of gout or kidney ston........ Read more »

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I own a couple of neat old medical books. One was published in 1935 and is entitled The Canadian Formulary. It's essentially a cookbook for pharmacists, particularly ones who plied their trade at the military hospital in Kingston, Ontario (there's a stamp on the inside cover). The book contains some interesting recipes, to say the least, which is what you get when your ingredient list includes arsenic, lead, mercury, strychnine, and chloroform.One recipe in particular that recently caught my eye........ Read more »

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To finish out the bipolar disorder topic month I will review some of the novel clinical trials in this condition.Clinicaltrials.gov is a valuable resource in searching for active and recently completed clinical trials.Here are some of the rostered trials from this site related to bipolar disorder that caught my attention.Sensoril for Bipolar DisorderSensoril is the trade name for the natural product ashwagandha an herbal extract from the herb Withania somnifera. This trial was sponsored through ........ Read more »

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Cobalt is a relatively hard and brittle metal that can be used to make fancy magnets and is typically found along with copper and nickel in the Earth's crust. It's silver-white in appearance, but when combined with aluminum and oxygen it forms pretty blue compounds such as cobalt blue. Owing to its various effects on the human body, our lives can intersect with cobalt in many ways. One of the things the metal or molecules that contain it tend to do is alter our mobility, speeding us up or s........ Read more »

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Clinicians treating bipolar disorder and patients with a bipolar disorder diagnosis are aided by the availability of expert opinion guidelines.In the last post, I reviewed a study that found decreased rates of suicidal behavior in bipolar patients treated with antidepressant drugs.This review prompted me to look for a recent consensus update on assessment and treatment of bipolar. One recent update came from the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence or NICE. This guideline is free........ Read more »

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Bipolar disorder is known to have a marked increased lifetime risk for suicide.There has been limited study of the effect of specific interventions in the risk of suicidal behavior and completed suicide.A recent study has added to our understanding of this topic using data from the Collaborative Depression Study or CDS.The CDS is a large longitudinal stud funded by the NIMH that enrolled a large sample of subjects with bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder and unipolar depression.Subject were ........ Read more »

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The difference between a poison and a medicine is often not clear. Side effects are essentially ways in which a medicine can harm us but it's alright because the effects usually aren't too bad and we otherwise get healed. Antibiotics often cause an upset stomach, but they also prevent us from dying of an infected paper cut. A more extreme example is cancer drugs, which are often highly toxic but are deemed necessary in order to defeat a greater evil. Even still, there are substances for which th........ Read more »

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All mammals possess an armament of enzymes capable of breaking apart various groups of molecules. These enzymes are typically named after their target. Peptidases act on peptides, lactase hones in on lactose, and so on. The enzyme-driven breakdown of molecules serves a wide variety of functions, including acquisition of nutrients from food and broken down cell parts, regulation of communication processes between and within cells, and detoxification of potentially harmful plant-derived substances........ Read more »

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